


Until

by objectlesson



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M, Sebastian character study, Sebastian is somewhat of a bad demon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 04:59:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3237206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Long before he contracts the Earl of Phantomhive and becomes Sebastian Michaelis for better or for worse, he was known as a poet and a fool among demons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Until

**Author's Note:**

> This fandom sucked me up so quickly. There go my ambitions. Also, read on for season two spoilers and my thought process for this thing. 
> 
> \----
> 
> Anyway, this story was inspired by my interest in Sebastian's ever-mysterious interior, and what it means to be a demon, or a human, for that matter. There's this scene at the end of Deathly Butler that I've watched ONE THOUSAND TIMES where Ciel is about to kill Alois, and both Claude and Sebastian are watching. Alois has to order Claude to intervene, and when Claude does so, it is without passion, conviction, or intimacy. Then, shortly after, Sebastian swoops in spectacularly to save Ciel from the struggle, and it just looks entirely different in contrast. It's the first time I remember questioning whether Sebastian's devotion to Ciel was really the butler/demon 'aesthetic' or if it was motivated by something else, some intent which goes beyond that which is expected of a demon bound by contract. I decided then that either Claude was bad at his job (very probable) or Sebastian takes it all a little too seriously (also very probable). This story is an exploration of that potential. It's also stupidly romantic, oops.
> 
> Note: ALL SEX WITH CHILDREN CIEL'S AGE IS RAPE, NON-CON, ABUSE, ETC. I do not ever ever ever ever condone this type of thing. Ciel is incapable of giving consent as an abused child, so every sex scene in any story I've ever written in this fandom is coerced and essentially non consensual. Read at your own risk knowing that just because this is a WORK OF FICTION about ANIME CHARACTERS, doesn't mean the dynamic therein is ok.

Long before he contracts the Earl of Phantomhive and becomes Sebastian Michaelis for better or for worse, he was known as a poet and a fool among demons. He supposes this should have been a premonition as to how things would turn out for him in the end, the lighthouse which could have saved him from bashing himself to dust upon the shore. But he was never one to heed the light. 

Light burns demons, forces them to retreat and blister and seethe in their flames of cruelty. Any sensible demon would have recognized the warning and fled. 

But Sebastian, even before he was Sebastian, was not any demon. Weary with the taste of endless, petty, adult despair, he sought beauty while his peers sought sustenance. He wrote poems, while his peers wrote recipes. With black taloned hands he reached for the light, cradling it even as his palms were singed, dazzled by the things that would never belong to him. He found Ciel Phantomhive, ten years old and in ruins, and was moved. 

And like a moth, Sebastian will pursue the flame, only to spiral earthward and leave a trail of smoke in his wake. Any other demon would be shamed to suffer such a fate, to bear the evidence of such scorching. But Sebastian, even before he was Sebastian, at least thinks it makes for a beautiful poem.

\---

He is about to snuff the candles and leave his master to find sleep in darkness, but Ciel stops him. “Sebastian?” He asks, sounding small and drowsy. A little boy, as Sebastian often remembers with a terrific pang of some unnamed mess of hunger and other things in his chest. _A little boy, ten years old with soot on his face and blood in his mouth, a darkness so pure it burns white like magnesium._

“Yes?” He asks, pausing. 

“Stay with me until I fall asleep?” 

_A little boy_. For all his certainty and ruthlessness, beneath the hardened eyes and unsmiling mouth is just a little boy. It is childish certainty and foolish ruthlessness. Ciel has never told Sebastian that he’s lonely, but Sebastian knows. He knows all the flavors and nuance in the souls of humanity, and Ciel is so very, very sweet with loneliness. This is not the first time he’s asked his Butler to remain by his side, and Sebastian suspects it will not be the last. 

“Of course,” He says, moving to stand at the foot of Ciel’s vast and cold bed. His eyes are made to see even in the blackest pits of hell, so it’s easy for him to make out Ciel’s fragile shape at the center of it, like an undiluted pupil swimming in a wide, terrified eye. 

Moments pass without any change in his wakeful breath. Eventually, his eyes snap open, casting one half of the room in a erie, violet light. Sebastian instinctually touches the back of his hand, where he bears a matching tribute to their bond.

“I can’t sleep,” Ciel announces, audibly irritated. 

“Shall I prepare you some hot milk?” Sebastian asks. 

He can hear Ciel shaking his head, the sound of skin shifting against silk rustling in the night. “Sebastian, you will stay with me always, correct?” The words hang in the air like snowflakes, frozen and pure. Sebastian wants to reach out and grab them, melt them in his palm and lick away the remnants, keep them inside himself forever. 

“Until the very end, my lord,” he answers. “It is my covenant.” 

Ciel is quiet, then he rolls over, onto his other side. “Will you come closer? It’s hard for me to imagine you’re really there in the dark.” He whispers. 

Sebastian strides to the bedside, and alights beside Ciel, joining him in the apex of that bloodshot eye, helping Ciel dilate. He smooths his palm over the crown of his young master’s head, tucking hair soft and velveteen behind his ear, closing his eyes with his thumb. “Yes, my Lord,” he swears, other hand over his chest as if making an oath. “Now. Sleep.”

Ciel lets out a long, shuddering sigh, and it sounds like the final couplet of Sebastian’s most prized sonnet. 

\---

Before Claude was Claude, he often shared his contempt for Sebastian’s approach to humanity, to when they crossed paths in hell. Nothing changes now that Sebastian is on Earth while his brethren seethe below. 

“I am quite in favor of playing with your food, _Sebastian Michaelis_ , but this is something entirely different. Some may say it is even sacrilege,” Not-yet Claude hisses from the Underworld. 

Sebastian ignores him. After all, messages from that realm seem meaningless when he is here, under contract. The rules in hell are not the rules on earth, sacrilege in hell sometimes tenderness on earth, and he never was one to scorn something as fascinating as tenderness. 

Not-Claude persists, a thorn rattling against the gates to the manor, carried in by the wind. “I heard you were finished with humanity, fatigued. I heard you were planning to starve yourself until either your heart stopped or the world ended, but here you are. Contracted to a ten year old boy. More than contracted, I think.” 

“He’s thirteen,” Sebastian says, breaking his vow of silence, inviting Not-Claude in through the crack in his composure. Darkness swirls around him and through the halls, putting out candles and chilling the air. It is a show, Not-Claude knows there is nothing he can do to a fellow demon’s contractee, but still, Sebastian bristles. 

“I apologize,” the darkness says. “I must admit, it is a singular soul which you are possessing, _Sebastian_. You have made yourself a pearl. Pity it must be wasted on a fool like you.” 

“The Earl of Phantomhive is mine,” Sebastian reminds Not-Claude, allowing his own darkness to flicker behind him like a vast, hungry shadow, rising to fill the manor with blackness while its human inhabitants sleep, shivering, gathering their sheets closer around their bodies, dreaming of snow and sadness. Sebastian wishes he could protect the Young Master’s dreams, but there is only so much a butler can do. 

“ _The Earl himself_ is yours? Or his soul? Do you even know the difference anymore?” Not-Claude taunts, crackling like low-burning flames at he retreats, edged out by Sebastian’s immense, rage-sick infinity. _Do you even know the difference anymore?_ Echoes distantly, a loop on repeat. Sebastian kills it, and it spasms to stillness and silence at his feet. 

\---

After a day of trail riding with Lady Elizabeth, Ciel returns to the manor stiff-legged and flushed. He collapses into his favorite desk chair once the sound of hoof-beats and carriage wheels has faded, and sighs dramatically. 

“Horses are filthy,” he announces, eyes shut tight and a crease through his brow. 

Sebastian pours him some tea. He notices that his master’s hair is sweat-damp, falling in chunks over his face. He smiles a small, private smile to himself, amused by Ciel’s humanity, his fallibility, his fragility. “Not as filthy as dogs, I feel I must remind you,” he offers. 

Ciel rolls his eyes. “I didn’t just spend four hours bouncing around on the back of a dog,” he explains dryly. “Now draw me a bath.” 

“Certainly,” Sebastian answers, bowing before he turns on his heel. He finds the stubborn, willful clarity which drives every one of his young master’s claims to be beautiful. It doesn’t matter if Ciel speaks the truth, the way he declares things _makes_ them true, chases the muddiness of doubt. Ciel asserts his opinion as if there is no other alternative, as if he is rewriting history. 

Sometimes it gives Sebastian chills. Other times he is forced to withhold laughter at the absurdity. Regardless, he is always moved, left stunned and dry-mouthed that such cold, cruel conviction could come from the soul of a thirteen year old child. 

Ciel leads the way to the lavatory, limping down the hall. He perches on the counter as he waits for the bath to fill, watching the water bubble and swirl and steam, looking small and frail. Sebastian drinks in the spectacle. 

“Why do people ride those beasts,” Ciel states. It is not a question. “It’s a painful and inefficient means of transportation, and an equally painful and pointless activity for sport.” 

Sebastian cocks his head, rolling up his sleeves as he examines Ciel’s ungentlemanly slouch. “It is only painful when the rider is tense, or inexperienced,” He explains, smiling through his hair at his master. 

Ciel glares. “Quit patronizing me and see what you can do with my calves. They feel like I walked to London on foot.” 

His fury is delectable, so pure and childish. Sebastian wants to pull his small and aching body into him, lick the trace of salt from the hollow of his throat where his sweat has dried into a glistening patina. Instead, he crouches to one knee, and bows his head. It is a wonted position for him, and he sinks into the familiarity of it like releasing held breath.

He unlaces Ciel’s hardly-used riding boots, the new leather squeaking in his hands as he pulls them easily from slim calves, followed by skin-warm stockings and elastic garters. Though Sebastian ritually removes Ciel’s garments at least twice a day, the revelation of skin so terribly, torturously smooth feels like a sacrament each time. As he handles his calfs, gingerly prodding and pressing the exquisite pale flesh, Ciel winces and makes an impertinent noise. 

“Gentler,” he orders, opening the eye Sebastian must obey, for better or for worse. 

Sebastian nods, though he is applying an infinitesimal amount of pressure to the sore muscle. Ciel is infuriatingly delicate, fish-bones and skin like raw silk. He caresses his master’s legs, touch light and feathery as he draws his fingers up the outside of his calves, down the sharp line of his shin, and up again to ghost just over the flat plane of his narrow thighs. It feels like a mistake, like he shouldn’t be able to get away with touching Ciel like this. It feels like writing poetry. 

Ciel sighs. “Better,” he mumbles, letting his chin fall to his chest. Sebastian wants desperately to tilt that chin back up, to take it between his thumb and fore finger and draw the small, tight purse of his lips between his own teeth. He wants desperately to dig his nails into Ciel’s tender skin and make him cry out, eyes flashing and palm raising to strike. He wants desperately to break him, to save him. There is nothing he does not want desperately from Ciel Phantomhive. 

Sebastian knows this is not the way a demon is supposed to regard his next meal, but because in his own mind the beauty of light and all its grand danger will always extinguish the safety of hell’s darkness, he cannot fabricate even a thread of genuine regret. 

\--

He’s not sure when things begin to change inside him, when the feathers begin to assemble and form wings. He just knows that eventually, his heart takes off in flight. 

Demons do not measure time as humans do, in minutes or hours or even in years, but only in souls. And Sebastian has lived through many, many souls in his miserable centuries spent wandering. He has consumed droves of humanity, he has reigned over their filthy streets in a throne of pestilence and famine, of sorrow and war. Conversely, he has lived a bottom feeder, scavenging for bones and scraps and free souls in mass, refusing contracts because after so many disappointing months spend in servitude for mediocre payoffs, no one human soul appealed to him enough to deign down in exchange for its flavor.  
He has eaten in all the ways he knows how to eat, and then, grown weary of eating. Weary of food, of hell, of sex, of blood, of vengeance. After decades upon decades of the same petty revenge tales and shallow wishes, the consumption of humanity only made Sebastian all the hungrier. As if filling the void in his gut only made it grow. 

He was willingly abstaining when he found Ciel. Sebastian has lived through many, many souls, but never had he encountered such purity, such pain.It felt like a fever-mad act of curiosity, at first, to reach out and take that frail hand in his own, some rash mistake he made in his state of starving longing. Now, it feels like fate. Sebastian’s favorite literary device is foreshadowing, after all. 

Just as he has changed Ciel’s soul, possessing Ciel’s soul has changed him, in turn. Somewhere over the course of two years (one soul, demon time), Sebastian has ceased seeing Ciel Phantomhive as just his future meal, or a particularly beautiful poem, or even as a mere soul at all, but as whole and complete work of art. 

Sebastian dreams of his master’s soul, he dreams of his thin pale legs like a necks of swans wrapped elegantly around his own back. He longs to feast upon his deepest interior, and he longs to hold the slip of his throat in a fist and kiss his dying breath away. He wants Ciel’s soul, he wants Ciel’s body, he wants Ciel. 

_Do you even know the difference anymore?_ Sebastian asks himself. Most days, he does not have an answer. 

\---

Its on a night when Ciel cannot sleep, and has requested the presence of the devil to protect him in the darkness. Sebastian sits stiff-backed and silent beside his young master, the outside of his left thigh pressed up against the small, fitful body. 

Eventually, Ciel huffs. “Sebastian, tell me a story.” Then he reaches out, half blind, and lets his hand fall upon his butler’s lap. “Perhaps only boredom will bring me sleep.” 

Sebastian takes the hand between his gloved palms, surprised when Ciel doesn’t snap it away immediately and act as if he has been condescended to. His arm is limp, exhausted, and he allows Sebastian to gently knead up it towards the elbow. “What type of story would you prefer, my lord?” He asks. 

Ciel sighs, shaking his head, his skull moving against Sebastian’s side as he does so. “I don’t know. Any story. A story about you, before you were the Earl of Phantomhive’s beloved butler and instead were some disgusting animal in hell. Tell me about that.” His voice is lilting with mockery over the word ‘beloved,’ which makes Sebastian smile. 

“I did not know you were curious about my past” Sebastian states, letting his fingers slip higher, under Ciel’s cotton sleeve. “I thought it too sordid for your young, impressionable ears.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ciel snaps, closing his eyes. 

Sebastian studies his master, his round, pale cheeks and perfect cupid’s bow lips in all their unsmiling glory. His hair is mussed from his tossing and turning, plastered in stringy clumps across a perspiring brow. Sebastian leans down close enough to smell the clean, young sweat, and begins his tale. 

“Once upon a time, there existed a creature in hell so loathsome and ancient it had grown weary even with as base and necessary an action as eating. It swore it would not indulge upon another meal unless it discovered a soul it deemed truly beautiful. For a beast of darkness, its standards of beauty were unreasonably high, meaning its quest was designed to be a fruitless one,” Sebastian explains, caressing Ciel’s thin, pale arm all the while. He brushes up to his neck, his cheek, gently pushing his hair from his face to reveal two twitching eyelids. Still, Ciel does not push him away. It seems a miraculous thing. “This choice to starve in search of beauty earned the creature a reputation as a fool,” he continues. 

“Understandably so,” Ciel murmurs. “Go on.” 

Sebastian clears his throat. “To everyone’s, including its own, surprise, the creature found what it was looking for. A beauty so pure, so wretched, it drowned the beast’s ennui and disgust with humanity and replaced it with something else.” 

In this moment, Ciel tilts his face almost imperceptibly into Sebastian’s open palm. They are both quiet in the darkness, Sebastian looming inches above his master’s body, close enough to see the flutter of dark lashes against a pearl-white cheek, to see the flicker of a tendon tensing in Ciel’s breakable neck. Breath held, he nods so close that a strand of his own hair sticks to his master’s lips. 

Then, Ciel half-opens his eyes, casting them both in pale, incandescent violet. “What was it replaced with?” he whispers. 

Because he knows he can, because he knows there is a silent order held somewhere small and secret in crackling space between them, Sebastian leans down and kisses him. 

\---

Not-Claude returns that night, after Sebastian has left his master’s room, head bent and fingers deftly buttoning his starched collar. He’s shaking, which is something Sebastian cannot remember having done in at least a century, when a blackness swirls before him, stopping him fast in his tracks.

“What are you doing with that little boy, _Sebastian_ ,” It hisses, rising up in a pantomime of a fist before it cascades down again, like the tide. “If I didn’t know how cruel you can be, I would think you’d be better suited to be a human, rather than hunt a human, you soft and despicable thing.” 

Sebastian is unimpressed. He dissipates the black smoke with his palm, feeling tremendous, strengthened, invincible. He has swallowed the spit of his contracted tonight, he has cradled the delicate body in his hands like a beating heart. His to follow, his to crush, his to consume, his to love, and he has only been made stronger for it. 

“I am only giving him what he wants,” Sebastian tells the dark. “It’s my job, our job.” 

Blackness whistles past him, angry and terrible. His hair rustles in the chilled blast of it, but save for that minor ruffling Sebastian stands unchanged, unmoved. Not-Claude can rage if he must, he can throw knives and spew jealousy and hate, but Sebastian will rise above it, a monument to his own devotion to Ciel Phantomhive. 

“Call it what you will,” a voice echoes. “But you and I both know this is a tremendous aberrancy.” 

Sebastian forces the darkness from the manor, pushing it from the gates with the glowing seal upon his hand like a god commanding the storming sky. He dusts his palms off, and closes the door behind him, lips still stinging with the most exquisite of promises. 

\---

Sometimes in the middle of the night Ciel will cry out, a lonesome sound of agony resounding through the manor, high and bestial. And deep within himself, Sebastian will feel his own black heart clench in response. 

It has nothing to do with hunger or with the preservation of some future meal. It’s an involuntary thing, like the intake of breath, like arms extending to catch a fall. It’s instances like this one when he realizes with a mild bewilderment that he regards Ciel as something more than just a work of art he’s slowly painting to perfection, but as a human, a little boy. 

Sebastian comes running and throws open the door, finds his young master sticky with a sheen of nightmare sweat and tangled in sheets, red faced and innocent, ten-years old all over again. He wakes him, smoothing cool palms over his fevered brow, down his shoulders and chest to ground him, bring him back to the present and out of his blood-spattered maze of memories. 

And in the glint of his master’s sleep-dizzy eyes, he will see his own reflection, startled in a way it should not be. He is stricken by the depth of this river inside of him, the Styx upon which the gondola housing Ciel’s soul sails steadily onward. 

It has nothing to do with hunger, at least in moments, the way he regards his master. He holds the weight of Ciel’s fragile skull in his lap as he drifts slowly back to sleep, carding his fingers through silk-soft hair and wondering what it will be like once this poem is over, and the last body has fallen, and it is time to kiss Ciel’s soul away and swallow it whole. What is left for him, after that? What is left when nothing will ever compare, when beauty is gone and you are a demon who has forsaken food for splendor? 

\---

Skin cooling as he lies debauched in his butler’s arms, Ciel’s chest rises and falls in time with Sebastian's heart beat, that still novel sound he only hears when he’s in this body, in this form. Sebastian counts idly, letting his palm rub circles down Ciel’s shuddering stomach, until it proves to be too much sensation and the child rolls away, wincing, muscles still spasming in unbidden flickers like a dying flame. “Quit,” Ciel admonishes, but there’s no real conviction behind it. 

Sebastian does not give up easily. He bears down and follows him across the bed, catching narrow hips in hand and rubbing his face into the smooth, ivory concavity of Ciel’s delicate lower back. For all his cynicism and stubborn denial of anything and everything remotely pleasurable, Ciel excels at letting Sebastian have his way with him, chase him to the far corners of his terror and back again, until he is panting and pliant and begging. It is just another way in which Ciel will always submerge himself in darkness, given the choice between that and the light. It is just another way in which they are somehow the same, one small boy and one ancient blackness. 

It’s quiet, but Sebastian can tell his young master is twisted deep in thought by the fierce line running across his brow. He smoothes it with his thumb, waiting patiently for an admission. 

“Do you love me?” Ciel finally mumbles into his own arm, voice thick with spit and post-pleasure stupidity. “Can demons even love? Seems like it’s breaking some rule.” 

It’s a heavy question, the weight of which Sebastian has been bearing in anguish for months now. He has asked himself variations of these two inquiries time and time again, fashioning cathedrals with the magnitude of his feeling, destroying cities with the depth of his doubt. But now, with the question falling from his master’s bitten lips, it all comes easily. 

“Yes,” Sebastian answers. It is simple; it causes him no pain to say it, because it is true. The love of a demon is not like the love of a human, it must differ in some tremendous and fundamental way, but that does not mean it does not exist. He kisses Ciel’s hairline, his temple, drunk on the scent of his blood, on the dream of his future murder on that darkest day. “We can, and I do.” 

After a moment, Ciel answers. “Interesting,” is what he says. Followed by, “No wonder your brothers find you a fool.” 

Sebastian laughs, under his breath. Ciel is terribly amusing in these moments when his guard is down, when the sunrise approaches and he has been broken down, cracked open along a seam.  
“And what about little lords, given everything only to have it taken away? Can they love?” he whispers into Ciel’s ear, tongue darting out to trace the shell. He arches up into it, shivering before spreading out beneath Sebastian like melted snow. 

“I don’t know,” he muses, opening his marked eye and peering through it carefully, glowing in brilliant resplendence. “I certainly thought I had forgotten how to. Before all of this.” 

_All of this_ , Sebastian thinks, pushing Ciel’s small frame down into the mattress with his hips, dragging his teeth down the junction between neck and shoulder and biting a flush to the surface. _I will help you remember. I will show you how_. He thinks, making Ciel’s soul twist and roil and thrash and change, drawing it from the secret chambers in his chest with black tipped fingers and a blood tipped tongue. 

\---

If he ever successfully found and consumed true beauty, it was always Sebastian’s plan to perish after the rite was completed. If he didn’t, everything following that sacred damnation would be a disappointment, would fall flat and pale beside the soul of Ciel Phantomhive. There is no other way.

He used to eagerly await his own death, the poetic spectacle following his last supper. He used to sit coiled in hell, black and vaporous and thrumming with the dream of his own life, in all its long enduring misery, escaping in black wisps from his open and sated mouth. He used to take more pleasure in imagining _that_ verse of his elegy than in imagining the preceding, where he sucked the nonpareil soul from some faceless human body. 

That was, of course, before that body had a name, had a history, had midnight blue eyes which matched the family crest and skin like sin and snow. Three years and some months ago, when it was just an ideal, longed-for and half-loathed for its seeming impossibility. Now, although his ensuing death is inevitable, welcome, it is something he can wait for. Something he can draw out. Though he hungers desperately for the loveliest and most terrible of souls, he now holds such an anomaly in his palm, and he is willing to warm it there for an eternity, if that’s what it takes to reach perfection. He can wait to die, and wait to kill. 

\---

Sebastian, born from darkness and named by darkness, extended his hand of darkness to clasp bone-white fragility a cold and stony prison. A fool and a poet, he thought he would be pulling his prey in on a line, plunging another fool into his own black depths. He thought the soul will be salty in its regret when he finally opened his lips to taste it, as so many were before. 

But that is not what happens. As he takes that blood-speckled and satin hand in his own, there is no resistance. No struggle, no tug of war. Just a little boy, following him into any shadowed corridor, down any ill-lit staircase, beneath every crashing wave for one thousand tides to come. And, as a fool and a poet, Sebastian is moved. 

He drops to his knee, lays his marble cheek on the Earl of Phantomhive’s open palm and presses a kiss there before he closes the boy’s fingers into a fist. It is where he belongs. In darkness, following him into any shadowed corridor, down any ill-lit staircase, beneath every crashing wave for one thousand tides to come, until.


End file.
